Local Interaction Rules for Complex Shepherding Tasks

Engineer and validate local interaction rules among controller–controller and controller–target agents that realize more complex shepherding tasks within the harnessing-complex-systems-for-control framework.

Background

After presenting shepherding as a key instance of harnessing one complex system to control another, the chapter notes that existing interaction rules often target basic objectives (e.g., gathering). Extending these rules to more complex tasks requires principled design that maps local interactions to desired global behaviors.

The authors explicitly flag the need to design richer local interaction mechanisms to broaden the class of achievable shepherding objectives, moving beyond simple or canonical tasks.